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Sunday, 10 January 2016

Servitude to tyrants is
always oppressive. Hardship after hardship, year in year out, the never-ending horizonless
drudgery batters the body and scars the soul. Dictators come and dictators go, but
for the ordinary person in a totalitarian regime, the story is always the same.
Any regime where personal freedoms are rigorously circumscribed is
interchangeable with any other regime where human freedoms are restricted or
repressed. Across time, through history, the daily lot of what used to be
called ‘the common man’ – that is you and me – was a matter of brute survival:
you had to get to the end of the day, you needed some food to eat, somewhere to
lay your head, in the endless rounds of birth, copulation and death that made
up one’s life.

The Hebrew people in Egypt
are the archetype of this kind of servitude to the ruling powers – but their
story, our story, has been endlessly repeated up until our own times: whether
it is peasants in medieval Europe or serfs on vast Russian estates or
pre-emancipation black slavery in the Americas or the victims of Stalin or Mao
or Pol Pot or apartheid South Africa, or Assad’s starving victims today in
Syria, ordinary human suffering has been the norm for the majority of humanity
through the ages.

Much of this depth of pain is
probably unimaginable to us, unless we choose to study history or read fictional
representations of it in novels. Sometimes there’s a film that tries to evoke
it – Twelve Years a Slave was a recent Hollywood effort. But most of these
stories from the past have sunk into the vast abyss of silence that is time
gone by. It is all lost: the pain, the humiliation, the meaninglessness of
empty, abused lives, generation after generation, century after century, all of
it swallowed up in the ruthless jaws of time. There are few written records of
the inside history of human suffering through most of recorded time, and in
truth little wish in many of us to know about the cruelty and callousness of
the past. We have enough problems of our own to be getting on with – or so we
feel.

So when we do read – as we
are doing at the moment in the annual cycle of Torah readings - about the Israelite
slavery in Egypt we both can and can’t relate to it. In one way it has the feel
of fiction: it’s a legend of a people’s origins written generations later based
partly on folk memory, and as we read it has the feel of an extended fable being
constructed to conform to a specific ethno-religious worldview. It’s not ‘history’
as we now think of it.

We heard last week how the
Egyptian god-king, the Pharaoh, responds to the request by Moses and Aaron that
the people should be allowed to have three days off work to go and offer
sacrifices to their god in the wilderness. The Torah text dramatises this with a
direct ‘quotation’, as it were, from Pharaoh, speaking to Israel’s spokesmen:
‘Why are you distracting the people? Get them back to work!’ (Exodus 5:4). And
he then instructs his minions to stop providing the Israelites with straw to
make the bricks: ‘Let them gather the straw for themselves’, he orders, ‘but
make sure they make the same quota of bricks as before...they’re
shirkers/slackers nirphim’ (verses 7-8).
Or as Iain Duncan Smith might translate it: ‘Work-shy scroungers’ – those who have to be
made to work for free in compulsory work-placements in order to get any
benefits. It’s the same mentality, across time. The same language. (But I
digress).

We recognise that the random
punitiveness of the powers-that-be in our Torah story is part of a literary
saga; it’s not a verbatim account even though it’s told with dialogue in it. Yet
it still has the ring of truthfulness because we can find exact parallels in
history of such brutality: in Soviet Russia, in the Nazi labour camps, on the
19th century cotton plantations, in Maoist collective farms in the
1950s and 60s. This has happened to people over and over again, people like us.
On the one hand it’s just a story, in an ancient religious text – and we don’t
believe these texts are actual historical records – but as we listen to it we
realise we are reading something that transcends its time and place, that
points towards something that isn’t just foundational to Jewish collective
experience but is also universal. The narratives of degradation of what man can
do to man is a universal story. And the Jewish people tell it and retell it,
because it is our particular story - but also because it is our collective
human story.

I wanted to write this week
about something else. I looked at the allocated Torah text (Exodus 6:2 onwards),
which starts: I am Adonai – YHWH – but I
appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai; my name Adonai
wasn’t known to them... And I thought: ‘I want to talk about the evolution
of God, and how our thinking about God might be changing, is changing, in our
own times’.

Don’t we see that process of
evolution already at work in our text? The narrators have ‘God’ say, as it were:
‘In days gone by, those patriarchs you’ve
heard about, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they knew about the divine in their own
way, they called me El Shaddai – ‘God of
Breasts’ – because they experienced me as nurturing them, like a mother, they
felt me as intimately involved in their personal lives, their family lives, they
felt me outside them yet closely enmeshed with their daily life...

They didn’t know me as Adonai, YHWH, the energy that
animates all of being, they didn’t know me as the spirit of life itself, the
power that generates life itself, all of life, including their life, moment by
moment. They couldn’t think of me that way. They weren’t ready to think about
me that way...

But now they
are. This is what they need to understand now. And it’s a quantum leap forward,
it’s a paradigm shift in consciousness that is required of them. To move from
slavery to freedom, from drudgery where you just try and survive the day, to
the liberation of having lives of hope and purpose, lives that you can shape
and that have meaning beyond sheer survival, this Israelite people need to
connect to me as Adonai, YHWH, the energy that animates the universe and all of
being, and that offers a vision of how people should live, could live, a moral
vision...

They need to
take their noses off the grindstone, they need to be freed from the grindstone,
and look up and out to what they could become as a people, they need to connect
in a living way to that ancient promise that they are to become a blessing to
others, a blessing to themselves. I, Adonai , am going to free them from their
limited slave lives and mentalities and give them a real purpose, a task, a
destiny - to be a holy people, a people attuned to the sacred nature of life,
of all life.’

Anyway, I was going to talk
about all this. And move on to describe the next quantum leap, and paradigm
shift, that we are in the middle of. But what I found myself thinking about and
writing about was not ‘God but suffering – about tyranny and hardship and how
much of human history has been a tale of degradation and oppression and
despair. And it still is. And in the light of that, to talk about ‘God’ and ‘the
divine’ and ‘a sacred spirit that animates all of being’ seems just nonsense, a
mockery of human experience, a kind of blasphemy against the felt realities of
so much human life, in the past and in the present.

We know from our own lives
the gap between our Jewish theology (for want of a better word) and the stuff
of our own lives. When we are in pain, when we are facing death, or the death
of someone we love, when we see tragedy in the world outside us, or face
tragedy and loss close to home, then we wonder: what is this God-talk all about
really? How can we believe in a loving, caring, nurturing God, a God who
supports us, who has compassion as his middle name? Life can mock, cruelly, our
wish to believe in this kind of a personal God, let alone a God who is a
Creator, or a Revealer, or a Redeemer, a God who is part of the unfolding of
history, as the story of Exodus suggests, a God who frees an oppressed people
‘with an outstretched arm and with mighty judgments’ (6: 6). Human suffering,
individual and collective, is an ongoing rebuke to this kind of thinking about
God. It is what turns many people off religion, and understandably so.

And yet what is remarkable
when you look back through history, is the power this Exodus story has had specifically
in the history of oppressed people. It has allowed millions and millions of
people for a millennium and more to endure extreme hardship, individually and
collectively - because it offers a story of hope: you might be living in
darkness and desperation now, but God has saved a people from oppression in the
past and can do so again; this is God’s nature – to be on the side of the weak
against the strong, to be on the side of justice rather than siding with those
who sustain systems of injustice.

This story in the Hebrew
Bible has kept Jews going in dark times, of course, times of oppression and
exile. But it’s also been inspirational for Christians: from Negro spirituals
that defied the 19th century slave-masters to the civil rights
campaigners in the 1960s to the South American liberation theologians who
helped people resist dictatorships to the secret Christian gatherings in
Communist China, this story, our story, has been a spiritual resource for
oppressed people through the generations, and it still is.

Ironically, Arab Christians
look to this story as speaking of the inevitability that justice will one day
overcome injustice in Israel and Palestine. And those medieval peasants and
Russian serfs might have been deeply anti-Semitic but they still looked to the
God who freed the Israelite people from bondage asa direct and personal source of comfort and
hope in the midst of their desperately impoverished lives. Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
a leader of the dissenting Confessing Church in Germany in the 1930s, part of
the political opposition to Hitler, was hung in a concentration camp in 1945,
but he never wavered in his teaching and preaching and belief that the Exodus
story was a paradigm for the final triumph of goodness over the evil of
Hitler’s oppressive regime.

All these examples are a
testimony to the power of the story, the way it incarnates for all time the
hope that tyranny and injustice do not last forever. And it is a story that
lost its religious trappings but retained its spiritual core for all those
hundreds of thousands of Jews who threw off the shackles, as they experienced
it, of religious orthodoxy, but poured their inherited belief that there
wasa power in history that was on the
side of the oppressed, and that oppressive systems could be overthrown - they
poured that faith, transformed it, into Marxism and messianic socialism at the
end of the 19th century.

The history of 20th
century socialism is the history of Exodus theology metamorphosed into secular
redemptive politics. And that so much of it turned sour is of course prefigured
in the very Hebrew Bible those passionate Jewish rebels so eagerly rejected –
the way in which in later Israelite history over and over again the people find
themselves victims of new forms of oppression – from outsiders, or from their
own kings or leaders. The failure to build the kingdom of God here on earth,
stretches from the time of Solomon to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and on, and
on.

And yet the Exodus story
never stops spinning its web of hope over successive generations: its power
comes from its insistence that there is, there has to be, a force in human
history that helps us move from oppression to liberation, from tyrannies of
suffering and lives of quiet desperation to societies of justice and individual
well-being. There has to be some force, it says – and call it godly if you
want, as the Bible does – that helps us move in that direction.

But whether that ‘God’ is
outside us, or actually a part of ourselves, an energy in us, an inner force
that gives us strength and helps form our vision and helps us transform the
world around us - this is what we need to talk about in this paradigm shift
that we are, in our generation, in the midst of. It’s where the conversation
about God needs to go now (and the implications of this are huge) if we are
going to make it through on this fragile planet we all cling to - cling on to
‘for dear life’, as we so fondly say.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue,
London, January 9th, 2016]